AHDB Soil Management Guide

Share resources, groups and projects that you've found helpful for soil management.

The principles of Soil Management are set out in AHDB's Soil Management Guide

Related Organisations

Content below is from across the PEP community and is not necessarily endorsed by Stewards or by PEP

Connected Content

ADAS provides ideas, specialist knowledge and solutions to secure our food and enhance the environment. We understand food production and the challenges and opportunities faced by organisations operating in the natural environment

Soil is an essential natural resource for all farmers. Over recent years many initiatives have sought to provide information and advice on soils and Soil Health, notably AHDB Great Soils. 

Anglian Water is the largest water and water recycling company in England and Wales by geographic area. We supply water and water recycling services to almost seven million people in the East of England and Hartlepool.     

Practical sustainable farming regardless of labels.

Field drainage is installed to rapidly remove excess soil water to reduce or eliminate waterlogging and return soils to their natural field capacity. Drains can be used to control a water table or to facilitate the removal of excess water held in the upper horizons of the soil.

Tell us how you are improving your soils. Share useful resources, organisations and initiatives.

The intricate web of relationships between physical, chemical and biological soil components underpins crop and livestock health and productivity.

Innovation for Agriculture (IfA) is an independent knowledge exchange charity that aims to bridge the gap between science and practice. 

MINAGRIS is an EU-funded project which is aiming to contribute to healthy soils in Europe by providing a deeper understanding and tools to assess the impact of microplastics and nanoplastics in agricultural soil health.

Share your ideas and experience of how to improve nutrient efficiency and reduce dependence on artificial fertilisers

ADAS Farming Association membership provides independent strategic technical support to help you improve farm productivity. We put current research into perspective and offer clear guidance on forthcoming agronomy decisions for our members. We also cover non-agronomy topics such as biofuels, waste regulations etc. Conferences and meetings will cover various topics and can be attended by any member. All of our events and publications will be allocated the appropriate BASIS and NRoSo points.    

Good soil structure is vital for optimising water and nutrient use efficiency; and for sustaining profitable cropping systems. Poor soil structure and compaction can reduce yields, restrict access for field operations, increase fuel use and, for high value root and vegetable crops, increase reliance on irrigation. Where there are clear signs of soil compaction, cultivations to remove the compaction may result in a yield benefit. Visual soil assessment is important to assess the extent and depth of compaction and to inform decisions on the most appropriate course of action.  

Established in 1971, Cambridge based Delta-T Devices specialises in measurement sensors and monitoring systems for agriculture and horticulture.

Guidance from AHDB to help adapt arable cultivations on a rotational basis Download the Guide, watch videos and use the tools.

Series by the Farmers Guardian exploring issues around cultivations and establishment

Guide by Graham Shepherd (Landcare Research, New Zealand) giving an approach to assessing soil qu

Useful practical resource about soils and erosion.

Direct drilling, also known as no-till farming or zero-till farming, is an agricultural practice that involves planting crops without prior ploughing or cultivation of the soil.

Soil organic matter (OM) is all living or once-living materials in the soil.  OM provides a direct source of energy/food for many soil organisms: it is the fuel in the soil food web.  Turnover of OM successively releases and immobilises elements vital to the nutrition of crops. 

Healthy, well-managed soils are the foundation for productive farming systems. Taking steps to improve soil health is a vital part of future-proofing all farms against the challenges of climate change and changing government support, by supporting good yields and reducing environmental impacts.   Every farm and field is different and there is no single approach for creating healthy soils. These printable guides give targeted guidance for a range of farming systems. They have been developed by a wide-ranging partnership across the farming industry brought together by the UK Soil Health Initiative, the WWF-Tesco Partnership and CFE to help you to identify the actions you can take to better manage soils for a sustainable future. https://www.cfeonline.org.uk/environmental-management/soils/uk-soil-health-initiative-guides/

Group coming out of the YEN looking at ways to increase deep rooting, by encouraging deep burrowing earthworms.

Soil is a major source of nutrients needed by plants for growth.

Soilscapes is a 1:250,000 scale, simplified soils dataset covering England and Wales.

Six Simple Steps for your soil to help improve the performance, health and long-term sustainability of your land

Among legume crops, forage peas and field beans show the most symptoms of legume fatigue.

Soil organic matter (SOM) serves as an important indicator of soil health.

The British Society of Soil Science (BSSS) is delighted to announce the next Zoom into Soil webinar will take place on Wednesday 7 February from 12:00 - 1:00pm (UK time) and is free of charge to register.

Adding organic materials can potentially lead to better drainage, more resilient soil, more efficient irrigation, higher crop yields and better crop quality.

With soil cultivation expert Philip Wright Join ADAS as we discuss how to maintain good soil structure and best cultivation practices.

Join this webinar to hear from monitor farmer David Cross and independent consultant Dr Liz Genever as we discuss soil health and other updates from the Monitor Farm.

This Royal Society Report presents the evidence for the relationship between soil structure and benefits to agricultural productivity, clean water, flood prevention, climate change mitigation and other ecosystem services. 

Prepare for an enlightening chat about sustainable soil management and agricultural innovation as we're joined by Victor Monseff. During this broadcast, we'll be delving into Victor's journey from agricultural engineering to spearheading soil health initiatives.

Prepare for an enlightening chat about sustainable soil management and agricultural innovation as we're joined by Victor Monseff. During this broadcast, we'll be delving into Victor's journey from agricultural engineering to spearheading soil health initiatives.

With the improvement of smartphone imaging quality (hardware side) and advances in image analytics (software side), there is currently a dynamic development intending to provide novel digital tools for soil assessment.

ADAS offers independent support for equine owners who want to improve their land management and resilience. Our expertise ranges from practical grassland advice to rural grant application support. As a team of horse owners, we know that horses have different pasture needs to that of other livestock. From sports horses to those with metabolic conditions like laminitis, each will have their own forage requirements. We take each individual circumstances into consideration and use the latest research to provide the right advice for the land and horses.

The British Society of Soil Science 2024 Annual Conference will take place from Wednesday 4 – Friday 6 December in Cardiff.

A series of helpful guides, produced by Westcountry Rivers Trust as part of Pinpoint.

Field drainage guide - Principles, installations and maintenance

Crop yields from zero tillage practices improve with time. Controlled traffic farming increases c

Write whatever you want here - this is the main section. You can add links, add pictures and embed videos. To paste text from elsewhere use CTRL+Shift+V to paste without formatting. Add videos by selecting 'Full HTML' below, copying the 'embed html' from the source page (eg Youtube), clicking 'Source' above and pasting where you want the video to appear.
You can upload an image here. It can be jpg, jpeg, gif or png format.
Upload requirements

You can upload a file here, such as a pdf report, or MS Office documents, Excel spreadsheet or Powerpoint Slides.

Upload requirements
Authors Order
Add Authors here - you can only add them if they already exist on PEP. Just start writing their name then select to add it. To add multiple authors click the 'Add another item' button below.

Please ensure that you have proof-read your content. Pages are not edited further once submitted and will go live immediately.

Configure the meta tags below.

Use tokens to avoid redundant meta data and search engine penalization. For example, a 'keyword' value of "example" will be shown on all content using this configuration, whereas using the [node:field_keywords] automatically inserts the "keywords" values from the current entity (node, term, etc).

Browse available tokens.

Simple meta tags.

The text to display in the title bar of a visitor's web browser when they view this page. This meta tag may also be used as the title of the page when a visitor bookmarks or favorites this page, or as the page title in a search engine result. It is common to append '[site:name]' to the end of this, so the site's name is automatically added. It is recommended that the title is no greater than 55 - 65 characters long, including spaces.
A brief and concise summary of the page's content, preferably 150 characters or less. Where as the description meta tag may be used by search engines to display a snippet about the page in search results, the abstract tag may be used to archive a summary about the page. This meta tag is no longer supported by major search engines.

Meta tags that might not be needed by many sites.

Geo-spatial information in 'latitude; longitude' format, e.g. '50.167958; -97.133185'; see Wikipedia for details.
Geo-spatial information in 'latitude, longitude' format, e.g. '50.167958, -97.133185'; see Wikipedia for details.
Robots
A comma-separated list of keywords about the page. This meta tag is used as an indicator in Google News.
Highlight standout journalism on the web, especially for breaking news; used as an indicator in Google News. Warning: Don't abuse it, to be used a maximum of 7 times per calendar week!
This meta tag communicates with Google. There are currently two directives supported: 'nositelinkssearchbox' to not to show the sitelinks search box, and 'notranslate' to ask Google not to offer a translation of the page. Both options may be added, just separate them with a comma. See meta tags that Google understands for further details.
Used to rate content for audience appropriateness. This tag has little known influence on search engine rankings, but can be used by browsers, browser extensions, and apps. The most common options are general, mature, restricted, 14 years, safe for kids. If you follow the RTA Documentation you should enter RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
Indicate to search engines and other page scrapers whether or not links should be followed. See the W3C specifications for further details.
Tell search engines when to index the page again. Very few search engines support this tag, it is more useful to use an XML Sitemap file.
Control when the browser's internal cache of the current page should expire. The date must to be an RFC-1123-compliant date string that is represented in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), e.g. 'Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:12:56 GMT'. Set to '0' to stop the page being cached entirely.

The Open Graph meta tags are used to control how Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other social networking sites interpret the site's content.

The Facebook Sharing Debugger lets you preview how your content will look when it's shared to Facebook and debug any issues with your Open Graph tags.

The URL of an image which should represent the content. The image must be at least 200 x 200 pixels in size; 600 x 316 pixels is a recommended minimum size, and for best results use an image least 1200 x 630 pixels in size. Supports PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. Should not be used if og:image:url is used. Note: if multiple images are added many services (e.g. Facebook) will default to the largest image, not specifically the first one. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The URL of an video which should represent the content. For best results use a source that is at least 1200 x 630 pixels in size, but at least 600 x 316 pixels is a recommended minimum. Object types supported include video.episode, video.movie, video.other, and video.tv_show. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically.
A alternative version of og:image and has exactly the same requirements; only one needs to be used. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The secure URL (HTTPS) of an image which should represent the content. The image must be at least 200 x 200 pixels in size; 600 x 316 pixels is a recommended minimum size, and for best results use an image least 1200 x 630 pixels in size. Supports PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly. Any URLs which start with "http://" will be converted to "https://".
The type of image referenced above. Should be either 'image/gif' for a GIF image, 'image/jpeg' for a JPG/JPEG image, or 'image/png' for a PNG image. Note: there should be one value for each image, and having more than there are images may cause problems.
The date this content was last modified, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format. Can be the same as the 'Article modification date' tag.
The date this content was last modified, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format.
The date this content will expire, with an optional time value. Needs to be in ISO 8601 format.

A set of meta tags specially for controlling the summaries displayed when content is shared on Twitter.

Notes:
  • no other fields are required for a Summary card
  • Photo card requires the 'image' field
  • Media player card requires the 'title', 'description', 'media player URL', 'media player width', 'media player height' and 'image' fields,
  • Summary Card with Large Image card requires the 'Summary' field and the 'image' field,
  • Gallery Card requires all the 'Gallery Image' fields,
  • App Card requires the 'iPhone app ID' field, the 'iPad app ID' field and the 'Google Play app ID' field,
  • Product Card requires the 'description' field, the 'image' field, the 'Label 1' field, the 'Data 1' field, the 'Label 2' field and the 'Data 2' field.
A description that concisely summarizes the content of the page, as appropriate for presentation within a Tweet. Do not re-use the title text as the description, or use this field to describe the general services provided by the website. The string will be truncated, by Twitter, at the word to 200 characters.
By default Twitter tracks visitors when a tweet is embedded on a page using the official APIs. Setting this to 'on' will stop Twitter from tracking visitors.
The URL to a unique image representing the content of the page. Do not use a generic image such as your website logo, author photo, or other image that spans multiple pages. Images larger than 120x120px will be resized and cropped square based on longest dimension. Images smaller than 60x60px will not be shown. If the 'type' is set to Photo then the image must be at least 280x150px. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The MIME type for the media contained in the stream URL, as defined by RFC 4337.